Pulse

By GCN Staff

DARPA taps Raytheon to protect DOD communications

Despite the military's heavy reliance on networked communications, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contends the wide-area network infrastructure that supports such information exchange is far too vulnerable to failures and attacks.

DARPA's Edge-Directed Cyber Technologies for Reliable Mission Communication program aims to bolster communication resilience against both cyberattacks and common network errors by adding new capabilities to the communications devices at the edges of the network, rather than to the network itself. The EdgeCT approach would make it easier to mitigate WAN failures on the fly.

To accomplish this, DARPA awarded a Raytheon BBN-led team a contract to develop an overlay network, interconnecting users through secure connections. Through these connections, software could continuously monitor events in the larger network and their effect on traffic flow, Raytheon officials said. The overlay network also could exchange information about network conditions and then dynamically configure the way the network handles application traffic to maximize performance.

“Recovering from network attacks or working around misconfigurations can disrupt traffic for hours,” said Greg Lauer, EdgeCT principal investigator at Raytheon BBN. “Our aim on the EdgeCT program is to minimize that disruption to minutes or less. Our approach does not require control or direct observation of the wide-area network and so it can be easily deployed in end user enclaves.”